Ken Chad on Library Services Platforms

Ken Chad just released his briefing paper ‘Rethinking the Library Services Platform‘ on his HELibTech wiki. It’s an excellent overview – Ken has been surveying library technology for about twenty years, and has maintained great independence both from individual vendors and from the Open Source movement.

While every vendor currently markets their latest offering as a ‘platform’ rather than an LMS or ILS, Ken defines the term ‘platform’ as a technical standard that enables interoperability of various vendors’ applications; something that goes significantly beyond the few APIs today’s systems offer. The ‘Cloud’ could facilitate such interoperability because connectivity between different vendors’ applications doesn’t have to be replicated for every single end user, and data can be shared rather than copied into customers’ set-ups.

Where I don’t quite agree with Ken is his take on OSS vs. proprietary. Ken seems to think that only big companies such as EBSCO and Proquest can fund the technological development needed for the creation of the next generation of library software, while OSS struggles ‘to catch up with hundreds of person-years of development, testing, and documentation’. Is that really so? I’ve worked with an Open Source LMS (Koha), and was amazed how fast it developed – and how little it cost to have new features coded. And I’ve worked with a mainstream proprietary LMS (Aleph), and have been perplexed how little that has changed in nearly twenty years, and how much the vendor still charges for their ‘vintage’ product. (How much would you be prepared to pay for Windows 98 these days?).

Having said that, I do share Ken’s vision of interoperable, modular, Cloud-based library software. I just hope libraries take the lead in developing their platform Open Source. To me, Kuali OLE has been the most promising development in recent years.

Elsevier out of sync with Elsevier?

Francesca Gualteri reported about her library in a pharmaceutical company’s use of Elsevier’s ‘Mendeley’ to manage the internal literature repository. Interestingly, she mentioned problems with the importing, especially of Elsevier publications. Others in the audience confirmed these issues. I suppose quite a few of the participants at the conference are going to ask the Elsevier reps at their stall about this issue…

Journal Apps

Guus van den Brekel presented an excellent comparison of four journal apps which the university of Groningen evaluated as a way to help academics keep up to date with their literature. How do your users want to read journals? Only in response to a concrete query, doing a database search? Or do they also browse tables of content? And how often do they do the latter – do they rather use RSS feeds from selected journals, or do they browse their favourite journals on a Friday afternoon?

All four apps come from fairly small, innovative companies, not from the big library software providers or publishers. They are:

The app that scored highest in the Groningen evaluation against a set of criteria and attracted a substantial amount of additional usage of the journals, was Browzine. I was glad to hear of this outcome: at Bern university we are currently trialling Browzine, too!